Meet the Man Who’s Making Supersonic Flight Possible Again | Blake Scholl

23:14What do you mean? Meaning like literally we're going this way. There's like an F-16 going this way. And the controller was like, knock it off, stop, slow down. and there's an F-16 ahead. Like randomly? They were like doing a training flight and then tested. This was on the first flight? This was in the first supersonic flight. Did you get to? Yeah, we were supersonic and then we had to like slow down and drop out of supersonic. I was like, come on people, no sky range. Like we're going to cut off. I mean, it's just, in a way it's like funny and epic, right? Because like, oh, we're flying supersonic and then we got cut off by an F-16.

23:45So, okay, great. We didn't get all the data we needed. The run wasn't long enough. So we like let the F-16 go by. We turn around, we accelerate again. And then I think we ran out of airspace because there's like a test corridor. So we had to make a U-turn in the test airspace and get supersonic again. So it was – Geppetto was funny about it afterwards. People were asking him what is it like for the airplane to fly supersonic. And it actually – XP-1 flies better supersonic than it is subsonic. Like it's the best, smoothest condition for that airplane. It's just designed – It's like a performance sports car that's going fast.

24:15Yeah, and it's like locked in when it's supersonic. And Geppetto's like, yeah, it was her happy place. Like she really liked it. I had to do it three times. That's awesome. How far are you away from carrying passengers on this thing? About four years. Four years. Yeah. And what's the stated goal in four years? Like if I'm, I fly a lot. Like when - My condolences. Yeah. When will I, like, what will I be experiencing in four years? So in four years, it'll be like the first handful of airplanes have been delivered to the first airline and the first routes have been launched. I think there are going to be like multiple chapters of boom skeptics.

24:52And like chapter one was a startup can't build a supersonic jet. OK, put that one behind us. Then the next chapter is a startup can't build a jet engine. We're going to put that one behind us. And then the next chapter will be a startup can't possibly FAA certify an airliner. We'll put that one behind us. And then the next chapter, I think this will be like where we'll be at like four, four and a half years from now. They can't build them fast enough. They're going to be able to produce them at scale. And that will be the next hurdle. Sounds like SpaceX. There are a lot of parallels. There would be no boom if it weren't for SpaceX because I don't know if I could have gotten my head around the idea that there's a chance this was possible.

25:30And how many people will the plane fit? Again, we're designing for product market fit here. And the fairly obvious principle is the more expensive the ticket, the smaller the number of passengers and the smaller the airplane should be. So we're designing for profitability at a business class fare. So how many seats should the airplane have? Well, about the same numbers others have in business class because then you can fill the seats and make money. And so we're 64 seats on Overture One. You know, 64 like really nice seats. The one thing they don't do is fold flat because when the flight's three, four, five hours, you sleep on the ground in a much better bed than any flat bed on an airplane.

26:06By the way, that was the original idea. You know, in some ways - And you get more seats because it doesn't go flat? Exactly. Exactly. Two weeks in, that was the - Meaning what you're saying, sorry to interrupt, but what you're saying is like this idea of a 10-hour flight is gone. Right. So like if you're going five hours, what's the point of sleeping? Right. You sleep on the ground and like you're awake on the airplane, it's much better. Right. The same way, we don't put flatbeds on three, four-hour domestic flights. It doesn't make any sense. Right. The flatbed is really about, is it an overnight flight on a sufficiently long route that it makes sense to like take up more space on the airplane for a bed?

26:40I put that in scare quotes because like airplane sleep is not like real sleep. It's better than not sleeping, but it's not great sleep. I can't sleep on an airplane no matter what. Doesn't matter what. Doesn't matter where I'm going or what seat I'm in. Makes no difference. That's terrible. I'm sorry. It's terrible. And so about call it five, six grand. Yeah. Yeah. Like so to give an example. Round trip or round trip. Five, six grand round trip. I'll give you the economics. So in a nice seat. In a nice seat. TV. Of course. Starlink. Of course. I mean, we haven't done that. But unless there's something better than Starlink, it will be Starlink.

27:12There won't be. Yeah, I think probably not. But we'll see. There's some people trying to catch up. We're still trying to get Starlink onto every normal flight right now. Right, yeah. And hopefully that happens quickly because it's so painful now. Here's a crazy thing. If you look at satellite antennas on today's airplanes, there are all these humps on the back. It looks like a camel's hump, and it's terrible for aerodynamics. And why? Why? Because there has been no new airplane designed in the post-Wi-Fi era. Think about that for a second. The last time Boeing or Airbus launched an all-new airplane was 21 years ago.

27:46The 787 and the A350 were both launched in 2004. And that was like really pre-airplane Wi-Fi. And so every Wi-Fi installation is retrofitted on the airplane. And those are the only two airplane manufacturers in the U.S. Well, so there's Boeing in the US. There is Airbus in Europe, obviously. And those are the only ones that make international scale airplanes. There's Bombardier and Embraer, but they do small regional things, right? So basically, it's a duopoly. They both stopped creating new products. I mean, Apple goes like a year without changing the iPhone. And people are like, oh, they can't innovate.

28:21Like, Apple's dead, right? Like, what? Boeing went 20 years. Totally. And it's like, oh, and this year's software upgrade doesn't work. Totally. Right? It's an incredible U-turn of progress in an industry. But to go back to the Wi-Fi, so Overture is the first airplane designed where like Wi-Fi and satellite connectivity is like table stakes. So guess what? We're building into the airplane. There's like a bay for the antenna and it's recessed. So you won't actually see a hump on the back of the airplane. That's also why it's so expensive to put these internet systems into these planes because it's so much retrofitting.

28:56There's a lot of retrofitting and there's a lot of like one-off engineering. Like one of the, there are many kinds of threats. Even most private planes don't have good internet. No, no. Which is crazy to think about. I think it'll change quickly because like Starlink is fixing it. It's still expensive to put Starlink in there. Yeah. Because they have to retrofit the plane. They do, but also they've learned they can charge a lot for it. Right, right. So we flew Starlink supersonic. It's actually a great story in a lot of ways. Basically it was 15 days from like having the idea, wait a minute, we should do a live stream.

29:24It'd be great if there was an air-to-air live view of going supersonic. Okay, we've got our test airplane. We've got a chase airplane that's basically a fighter jet that follows it. We want to put a camera on the chase airplane and a live stream. Can we put Starlink in there? And so we called our friends at SpaceX. And we're like, can you give us a Starlink mini that's like unlocked to go fast? And they're like, sure. And so they sent us one. And we 3D printed some hardware so we could get it on the airplane. And then the team had so much fun. And they like ground tested it in the chief flight test engineer's Miata to like go more than 100 miles an hour and confirm the unit was unlocked the way it was supposed to be.

30:00And it would work at different angles. Yeah. Confirm the unit was unlocked. Yeah. Like, you know, they had a lot of fun doing the ground test in the Miata. But then we, yeah, then we put on the T-38 and like literally that like first supersonic flight that more than two million people have watched now was filmed on an iPhone and streamed on Starlink. Epic. Epic. So you said about 60 seats in the plane. Is that right? and 60 seats, call it five, six grand until the regulations change. I mean, what you're working towards very clearly is that the plane won't be ready for production for another four years.

30:32You're going to work on the regulations so that you can fly over land over those next four years. So I can take my SF to New York flight or whatever. Right. And how is the configuration of the plane? So no lay flats. Yeah. Is there aisles? Yeah. The final configuration is a secret still. Come on. Yeah, no, I can't do it. What do you mean it's a secret? It's a secret. What part of it is secret? So the actual floor plan layout, we have something that I think people are going to lose their shit over. We're not quite ready to show it yet. What I can tell you is the airplane for aerodynamic optimization, it's the first airliner that's not the same size front to back.

31:06It's actually bigger in the front and smaller in the back. And that's a principle called area ruling. It makes supersonic flight way more efficient if you tailor the fuselage. And so the Concorde is famously cramped. And what we wanted to do is create a great first impression and a great experience at every seat and an overall sweat the design details on the airplane the same way like a Johnny Ive would so that the passengers feel very cared for. And in that stressful experience that is travel, like Overture should be an oasis in the skies. A few things I can share with you is that the boarding door is 10 inches taller than Concord's was.

31:39That's an inch taller than a 737 boarding door. So a 95th percentile North American male can walk on board without getting a haircut. The boarding doors are the airplanes biggest. So you walk into this. We've got this mock-up of it in our offices. It's really surprising. People walk on. They go, wow, this is like an eight-foot cathedral ceiling in the front of what is like a pretty small supersonic jet. And then the tube gets narrower as you go to the back of the airplane. But the seats actually get better. The best seats are in the back of the airplane. The worst cross-section at the very back of the airplane is the same cross-section you get in a G650, which is the best private jet.

32:12So the worst row in Overture is like the best private jet experience. And is there middle seats? No middle seats. Middle seats are evil. Like no middle seats. What do you mean no middle seats? How could that be possible? I mean, there just aren't any middle seats. We designed a floor plan that doesn't have any middle seats. Is it 222? That would be one way to do it. Another way to do it would be like a big oval where everybody has a window seat. and in the middle, now you have all this space. Yeah, we looked at that. It wastes a lot of space. The art of airplane interior design is to create great comfort at every seat, enough space at the aisle and to use the whole space very efficiently.

32:58Empty space is wasted and space is at a real premium. How you get to a good answer on this is you need designers that think like engineers and engineers that think like designers and they intensely collaborate. We look at the product design as a product of engineering plus passenger experience plus airline economics. And you've got to get all three of those in sync to build something that will have product market fit. And this goes back to a little bit of the capital story of the company. There's this mythology that hard tech startups are more capital intensive than software companies. And there was actually a tweet that went viral yesterday that was showing data that basically says it's not true at all.

33:33Uber has raised more than SpaceX. Airbnb raised more than Android. the notion that hardware companies consume more capital just isn't true. The one difference there is there is a software company can demonstrate product market fit for small amounts of capital. And a hardware company needs more capital to demonstrate product market fit. And so one of our early lessons learned was we need to consume a software-like amount of capital to prove we were at product market fit before we'd actually built the hardware. And so that's why we did pre-orders. So that's why United, American have both placed orders with non-refundable deposits.

34:10And so we've done real things to prove that if we ship what we're trying to ship, that it will have product market fit. But then as we go through development, we have to make sure we don't lose that along the way. Eclipse was an airplane company that didn't make it through the financial crisis. And part of what happened was that airplane died a thousand cuts as it went through development. The thing that they ended up shipping was three times more expensive than where they started. It cost more to build than they were selling it for. And it didn't have anywhere close to the performance they targeted on day one.

34:42So they sort of like nominally had product market fit, but it like eroded. It kind of got contorted going through development. And so every time we do an iteration in development, we rerun the passenger experience and we rerun the airline economics. We don't let them get out of sync. And so the engineers, the designers, and the commercial people are all like peers. in the product development process. We've got to keep them all balanced. We call it the three-legged stool. In many ways, redesigning the entire airplane experience is similar to what Elon did with the car. And when you do that, you can do things like, I don't know, put an iPad in there or like make farting noises.

35:18You know, like you can do all sorts of different things, let alone now seeing things like self-driving, right? They have just an inherent advantage, building it from the ground up with modern day technology inside. Right. That's not having to be retrofitted. Yeah, that's right. And there's real power in controlling the software and the hardware. And Tesla has demonstrated that. We've seen it too. So the avionics on our test airplane was mostly off the shelf hardware, but it was our own software for the primary flight display. We're releasing the photo next week, and it's going to be a really epic photo.

35:51Something called a Schlieren image, which is a way you can take a picture of the airplane going supersonic and actually see the shockwaves. But to do this requires incredible flying. There's a camera on the ground pointed at the sun and you have to fly between the camera and the sun as they're pressing the trigger. And to do that, the airplane has to be supersonic plus or minus 250 feet from target altitude, plus or minus three seconds from time on goal. And by the way, we're doing this while flying at a faster speed than we've ever flown before. So it's an incredible flying by the test pilot, but how do we enable that to be possible?

36:27Well, we designed a guidance system to help the pilot get in the right place in the sky at the right time. And we call it JPS, the Jason Positioning System, because Jason did it. And it was like two weeks from the idea to the codes on the airplane. And so, you know, if we've been working with a traditional vendor, like you can't ship for like critical software in two weeks. That is so crazy. And can you just tell me, is the innovation that you think is going to blow people's minds? Is it a configuration thing? Is it a software thing? I mean, it's the speed, right? Like, well, yeah, obviously. But you were saying like, oh, we're not ready to announce like, oh, oh, the inside the airplane.

37:03Inside the airplane. It is a comfort thing. Comfort thing. Yeah. Part of my journey to doing this was 10 years of thinking, what would an airplane be like if Apple had designed it? You know, and I was asking that question that, you know, the Steve and Johnny era. When I started to ask that question, I would see all these things that you just can't unsee. Like look at a window of a commercial airplane and count how many like visual seams and gaps there are between the outside of the window and the inside of the airplane. It's visually cluttered. Think about devices that were built not by Apple or pre-Apple where like the bezels have like border and border and border and border and they're just nasty.

37:42And they're visual. I think, you know, most people don't notice it consciously, but it contributes to like the visual clutter. All glass plane. I mean, that's a bad idea for multiple reasons. Like aesthetically glass. We are working to reduce the visual clutter. Yeah. Like literally, if you come to our passenger experience lab, we have a mock-up of like several different window treatments where it's about how do we go from outside of an airplane to inside of an airplane in the most tranquil way possible. And you're not going to be a commercial airliner yourself. You're selling to the airlines.

38:15That's right. Yeah. It's like one hard problem at a time kind of thing. There are airlines that are great at running operations that have distribution. Airlines are very complex businesses. It's also important that we have the airlines there so we know we have product market fit. United was the first to place an order, and they've been a great friend of what we're doing. Scott Kirby is the CEO there. Mike Leskin, a new CFO, has demonstrated they're the most visionary team of any airline anywhere on the planet. And they're willing to throw in pretty early. And then they actually really help. So they help us look at the economics.

38:50They're technical people, work with our technical people, and we do technical reviews. United's in them. And so how do we fly an approach? What is the cockpit like? How do we cater the airplane? Their people are right with our people making sure that we deliver a product that every stakeholder loves it. Did you grow up flying planes? No, I grew up wanting to fly planes. My parents tell me that I had a fascination with airplanes since I was six months old. But I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and innovation was happening on the internet, right? It wasn't happening in airplanes. And so it didn't occur to me to have a career in aviation because nothing's happening.

39:28But I remember having a friend in high school who got flying lessons, and I remember feeling really jealous. And in the summer of 2000, I was here in the Bay Area. Doing what? I was a software intern at InktoMe. If we can remember that company, it became Yahoo Search. Wait, who started InktoMe? Brian Toddy and I think there are a lot of great people at InktoMe. Close to what I know. I swear I've had people on the show that were at InktoMe. Anyway. There are a lot of great people at InktoMe. Like it was like a great fortune to be there when I was like a sophomore in college. Okay. Writing code for internet infrastructure.

40:02But it was like one exit down the 101 from San Carlos Airport. And I'm this like well-paid tech intern. I'm like, wait a minute, I could get a flying lesson. And so I was like taking flying lessons while I was like coding and inked to me. And then what? It was a hobby. And I think it took me eight years to actually get my pilot's license because I kept like not focusing on it. You were like doing software engineering. Yeah. Yeah. Like I went to Amazon after school and I took some lessons and then stopped taking some lessons. And eventually I was at the startup in Seattle. And sorry, you spent years at Amazon, right?

40:32I spent five years at Amazon. And then I was at Pelago, which was actually the very first iFund company. And I was first employee there. and it was while I was at Pelago that I was like, okay, Blake, you've been telling your friends forever that you love flight. You still haven't gotten your pilot's license done. You need to commit and get this done. And so it was like 2007, 2008 that I finally got that done. And you're still like, this is my hobby. Oh, it's totally my hobby. My career is like software engineering. Yeah. And you were like, tell me if I'm mistaken, but you were quite successful in your career doing software.

41:02Like at Amazon, I've heard that you were a rising star there. I mean, I was very lucky to get to do some things that were high visibility. To Jeff. To Jeff, like at a remarkably young age. People told me later I was the youngest ever manager at Amazon. I don't think I was like 22 or 23. I didn't even know at the time. How big was your team? Five or six people. And then I think the biggest team I ever had at Amazon was like maybe 10. I sort of imagined myself like standing next to a rocket ship and like the rocket takes off and like my jacket got caught on it. And like, so the thing I did at Amazon that I was very fortunate to get to do was the very first ad buy from Google.

41:41And so back then, this is the early, this is like 2002, 2003. It's like starting to become clear that web search matters. Like maybe search engine marketing will matter. And the way everyone is doing search engine marketing is manually buying keywords. So you go to like, you know, adwords.google.com and like, you'd like type in your ad and you type in your keyword and you pick your landing page. and there's like basically no tracking. And so like our insight was there are 300 million unique searches on the web every month. Everyone's doing advertising by hand, which means all the advertisers are piling up on a tiny number of keywords and bidding those prices up.

42:16While 80 % of web searches have no ads. And we said, well, let's start by ignoring the popular expensive stuff. Let's just go buy all the ads that have like nothing on the page and we'll deep link into the exact most relevant things. But to do this, we'll need automation. So we built what was the first, I think the first automated ad buying system. And it would basically like spray and pray ads. Like it would like Mad Lib them. And then we'd track every click. We'd see what people bought. We knew the profit per every item sold. We could figure out what to bid in the ad auction. And we were doing all of this with like a screen scraper that would like log into Google and like click buttons.

42:48And so it didn't work at first, but eventually we got it to work. I didn't know this until later, a friend at Google told me, but there was a point in time where this was 7 % of Amazon's revenue and 7 % of Google's revenue at the same time. Wow. So you have a good run there. I had a good run, yeah. Go to Pelago. Yeah. Have a good run there. Yeah, sort of. You know, Pelago is a very ambitious company. It was like Foursquare plus Google Maps plus Yelp on a Motorola Razr in 2006. And it actually had like a surplus of good ideas and a deficit of focus. And the company really never worked. There are great people there.

43:24And we built some like amazing stuff, but we never got to product market fit. And ultimately that company got like acqui-hired. And you spent three years there? I spent like four years there. Yeah. And then what? Did you see it through the acqui-hire? No. Like I like left a year before the acqui-hire and I started my own thing, which - Another software thing. Just to be clear. Another software thing. It's just crazy that we're continuing to still talk about software things. Yeah. Like random software tech companies. So, right. Okay. So I'm an Amazon. So, okay. Theoretically, I know e-commerce.

43:51And then I go to Pelago, which like I said, is the first like iPhone company. So like one of the first mobile app companies. So I figure I know mobile. and like, oh, what should I work on? I should work on mobile e-commerce. So I start this thing called Kima Labs and I'm like, we should work on a mobile e-commerce idea. And so we end up making, I can't say this with a straight face. We ended up making a barcode scanning game. We never got that to, technically it worked, but we never got it to be anything that like really took off. People play with it. I was working like crazy, constantly worried about failure.

44:23And it was like, I kind of wish I'd never done it. While you were doing it. While I was doing it. I was like extremely depressed. My mental health was terrible because I'm like, what am I doing? Why did I get into this? Like, how do I get out of it? I'm going to fail. Like, I'm like - Why? It felt gimmicky to you? Well, that undermined my motivation. But then there was just like the, like any startup, there's always a risk of failure. And I think I overestimated how bad failure would be. And I was very worried about the impact on my career and my reputation. And yet the prize was like not meaningful.

44:54Like, wait a minute, I'm building a barcode scanning game for people who shop in stores. And I don't play games and I don't shop in stores. I'm an e-commerce nerd and I don't play video games. Like, what am I doing? And so like theoretically, my resume said I had competence for it. And yeah, we successfully shipped a bunch of apps and they were well-built apps, but there was like no inspiring product. And I had no product intuition because I was building what I thought I knew how to build, not creating something I wanted to exist. And you said overestimating the risk of failure. What did you mean by that?

45:24Yeah. I mean, like one of the things that's great about the Valley is that there is enormous, I'll say forgiveness or maybe even admiration for honest failures. Distinguished here very much from dishonest failures that are different. But I hadn't internalized that. Like I was very afraid of like the company not working. In reality, it basically was a failure. Like we were lucky to be at a point in time where we could acquire the company. And like we went back and like retroactively changed the liquidation preference such that In the acquihire, the investors would make money. And it was a very unique point in time that something like that was possible.

46:00But it was basically a failure. But then the failure was, okay, the investors actually did get their money back. Probably would have been okay if they hadn't. We'd only raised the seed round. And then I got kind of two years to do stuff at Groupon. Who acquihired you? Yeah. While kind of reflecting that entire experience and trying to figure out what I'd learned from it. And? What I learned was that I definitely wanted to do another startup. Why? I don't know how to articulate that. It was like my first flight. The very first time I got a flying lesson, it was something I knew I wanted to do. Like, wow, this is experience.

46:32I've got my life in my own hands, and it's simultaneously scary and thrilling. I think entrepreneurship is a little bit like that. It's just like it bit me, and I don't know if I can explain well why it did. But I started a company in my parents' basement in high school. I kind of knew I wanted to go build stuff from scratch and create. and I'm driven enough that no matter what I do entrepreneurially, I'm going to be at my personal red line. Actually, the difficulty of startups is actually not set by the problem, it's set by the founder because we run at our red line and being at our red line from an effort perspective is going to feel the same regardless of whether we're building a supersonic jet or a barcode scanning game.

47:10Like the effort's actually the same and the way it feels and the fear of failure and like the high highs and the low lows. Internalizing it is all the same. The pain I think is actually the same. Hmm. But the rewards are completely different. Like if you fail at a bar scope scanning company, the idea of failing in that company feels just as bad as failing in a supersonic jet company. It actually feels much worse because like, wait a minute, this is a stupid mobile app. You couldn't make that work. Right. Versus like I started a supersonic jet company and all my friends like roll their eyes and they're like, all right, dude, like tell me when you got something that's high in the sky.

47:44obviously that's going to fail. So it's actually like way more socially acceptable to fail at a supersonic jet than to fail at a barcoats getting game. Like the first 18 months working on Boom felt very light because I thought our odds of success were like basically zero. Yeah. You're playing with house money. Yeah. I'm playing with house money. But during, sorry, before you get there, you spent two years at Groupon? Yeah. Like resting, investing? No, I mean, I worked hard and like I did stuff, but like, you know, the first year I was working on. And were you miserable? Were you as miserable then as you were?

48:16Oh, so the first year at Groupon, I was working on iPad-based point of sale for restaurants. It was really about what should have been Groupon 2.0. And that was actually a lot of fun. Groupon is such a story of missed potential. If they had shipped their 2.0 platform, this would be a$100 billion company. It's a different conversation, but they screwed that up. The founding CEO got fired at the worst possible time. And the next guy didn't have the vision for it. And so they were the email marketing business all the way into the ground. But my second year there, I had to run the core business. And I was like, I owned like email and like relevance, like all of the core deal stuff, including like the world's like most obnoxious spam cannon.

48:54And that was miserable. I mean, it wasn't as stressful as doing my own startup, but it was like, I'm working a lot of hours. There are low stress hours because I'm not, I don't feel like I'm carrying the weight of the whole thing on my shoulders the way I am if I'm founder or CEO, but it wasn't motivating. Like, Like, am I here on earth to like send more email? Right, right. And at what point did you build the courage to not just start another company, but yeah, this one? Well, I, so I like sort of fired myself from Groupon. What do you mean? So I was saving up money. The earn out was nice. My head was, I'm going to save a certain amount for my family.

49:29And then anything I save beyond that goes into the fun fund. In my head, the fun fund was I get to buy an airplane. And for yourself. For myself. and I had those when I was and I was like, OK, the longer I stay here, the more I put up with this, the better that airplane gets. And so if you're making good money, I was making good money. And at the time, for those that don't remember, was actually like a high flying company. It was on the way down at this point. OK, yeah, I was making good money. But like the company was actively burning its stock seed. Like it'd be like every quarter, it would be like, hey, revenue is soft.

49:59Like we got to make the quarter. We're not gonna make the quarter. And I, you know, and the CEO would call me and he'd be like, Blake, send more email. and I'm like, you know, that's why people unsubscribe, right? This quarter is soft because last quarter we sent too much email. He's like, I don't care. Like, we'll fix it next quarter. And it's just like, we're burning our stock seed, people. You know, anyhow, so I fire myself basically. The airplane getting better is not worth like continuing to run the spam machine. And so I almost actually bought the airplane. Are we talking like a G7? No, no, no, no, no.

50:30Like a prop plane. This was like a base hit. This was an aqua hire. Okay. This is like savings, not wealth. And so if I'd spent half of what I made, I could have gotten a single engine plane. And I almost did, but then that became the seed money for Boom. So my joke now is I'm never actually going to own an airplane, but the one I've got my eye on keeps getting better. And so you're saving money and then you fire yourself. At the time when you fired yourself, did you know that Boom was coming next? No, I kind of thought I would start something, but I wandered it for a little bit. I interviewed for a couple of jobs.

51:08Ultimately, I remember seeing an interview with Eric Schmidt, and he was talking about Google's mission and this notion of organizing the world's information and what an audacious mission it was. And he made the point, and this really influenced me, he said, audacious missions are easier than less audacious missions because they attract better people. And I remember hearing that and thinking, that's really true. And it's true not just for the whole team, it's true for the founder. What could I work on where no matter how hard it was, I would never regret trying? I remember thinking like my first company, like I made all these terrible decisions.

51:42Let me just invert all those decisions. Instead of working on what I think I'm competent to create, what if I work on what I want to exist? forget whether I'm competent to do it. And so for me, anything with an airplane in it went to the top of the list. And I started saying like, okay, I would just look at all my startup ideas in order of how happy I would personally be if they worked and forget everything else. And just, you know, I figured I'd like worked on that list and end up on like idea number four or five. And by good fortune, I'm still on idea number one. And I think I've come to believe, like I'd like share like one thing with founders.

52:16Passion and drive trumps knowledge and experience. If you imagine yourself in like the day of IPO, 99 % of what you needed to know to get to that day, you didn't know on day one. You're going to learn a lot along the way. You're going to learn how to build a team and how to get a product market fit and how to run sales and how to do comms and investor relations. There's all this stuff you have to learn how to run a company and that you don't know virtually any of it on day one. So why not take 99 % to 99.5 % and like work on the thing you really want to exist, even if you don't know anything about it yet.

52:48Okay. Fair. So you go home, you write down your list. Yeah. You have a wife? I had a wife then. You had a wife then? Yeah. Yeah. I had two marriages that didn't survive. Boom. But yes. It was boom. Or maybe it was my poor judgment, but yes. Okay. And I remember like, you know, I remember like, like when I was married at the time. I had three young children. In your first marriage? Yes. When you're ideating on Boom. Yeah, ideating on Boom. I remember watching this Steve Jobs video where he said something like, there's one simple secret and that the world was made up by people no smarter than you are.

53:23And you can change it. You can build your own things. And once you discover that, you're never going to be the same. I remember thinking, wow. And part of me was like, yeah, no smarter than you are, Steve. But then part of it felt like he was talking to me and I'm like, man, I want to do that. And I remember being so excited. And I went and I showed my wife the video and she was like, what an asshole. And I'm like, man, I still feel inspired. And so I wanted to, you know, I had, I think my daughter was 14 months old. I had twins that were like basically just born. And I'm like, like, I want to go all in.

53:56And what'd she say? She said, you have to get a job in a year after you screw around with this. You have a year. You have a year. Yeah. And you're like, all right, I'll take that. Yeah. Fair compromise. Fair compromise. Yeah. And then to her credit, we picked up and we moved the entire family to Denver to build the company there. And so I'm grateful for that. Wow. Okay. So you go, the Elon version of this is he's like, I'm going to send, what was it, a plant or something to space to get people inspired by rockets again. Right. And then he realized, oh, this is actually way harder than I thought.

54:28The economics don't make sense. Where are all the rockets that I can go send up? Oh, no. oh, I think I have to build my own rocket to do this. Well, if I'm going to build my own rocket, I might as well send people to space. It was like this gradual progression. Yeah. Did you have a similar progression? No, is it probably the short answer? Like I never went through the like, let's just do a stunt to inspire people stage. Like I wanted to birth the product. Yeah. The most analogous thing to like, yeah, I think Elon tried to buy, I think the idea was he wanted to like put a plant or any kind of living thing on Mars.

55:01his idea was to go buy a decommissioned Soviet ICBM to like launch I don't know like a plant to Mars and the Russians wouldn't sell it to him yeah and the most analogous thing in boom history was how we got to you know our jet engine solution because we wasted a bunch of time trying to get like the big engine companies to build us a custom jet engine and that was like a total failure and that turned into a like well we got to build our own people said we were crazy to build our own jet engine. And I now very firmly believe we were crazy to do it any other way. And that's unlocked a bunch of things.

55:33Like this whole boomless cruise thing we're talking about would not have worked without our custom engines. The off-the-shelf engines that we could have gotten from a big company did not have the transonic performance to do it. They broke the sound barrier at too low of an altitude. The bottom of the U would hit the ground. And also that thing I was teasing about earlier, the passenger experience, what the configuration of the airplane is, the breakthrough I can't share. We came up with a little bit more than a year ago, and the engineers and the designers basically said, we've got to show you something.

55:59If you're willing to change the shape of the airplane very slightly, like this new insane floor plan gets unlocked. And we first ran it through our performance analysis tools. We lost a thousand miles of range. And that's like going from like 4 ,000 miles of range to 3 ,000. It means a whole bunch of routes you can't fly nonstop anymore. We're like, ugh, can't do that. I remember saying to the team, like, do we want to fly on this airplane or are we going to fly on that airplane? Everyone's like, yeah, that one. Like, that's the hot one. We don't know if we can make it work, but let's figure out how.

56:26The how turned out to be really working the airplane and the engine together to get them optimized to meet each other. And we got back the vast majority of that thousand miles of range by tuning the engine to match the airplane, which we could not have done if we were getting it from somebody else. Wow. Just because you're like a pilot for fun, you didn't know a thing about building jets. No, I mean, I had to learn it all. Like how? What was your initial instinct on learning? The very first thing was like the three-line spreadsheet that said that the initial idea, which turns out to still be the key idea, is if you can make a supersonic seat match the economics of a flatbed in business class, you can get a very large market.

57:10And you don't need the flying bed. You just need a seat. To do that requires a less than 10 % improvement in fuel efficiency versus Concorde. The moment I saw that, I'm like, that doesn't sound like insane. I don't know anything, but that sounds feasible. So at that point, I'm like, okay, I imagine myself, I'm like, okay, Blake, take your own ego out of this. Forget that you're looking at this. Imagine the year is 2050 and you're sitting on the beach, like sipping Mai Tais, reading the aviation history books, and you're reading about how the world made the transition to supersonic flight. How do you think that history goes?

57:40Is it after 150 years of not doing it, Boeing finally did it? Probably not. Like history never goes like that. Like, okay, it's going to be a new company. it's going to be probably somebody from outside the industry because everyone from inside the industry is going to believe it's impossible. Okay. So imagine that outside industry effort. What would it look like? What would the attributes be that will be part of the success story? Well, they're going to have to be really great at articulating a vision for why this matters long before it comes to fruition. They're going to be really good at persuading people to join the team.

58:10They're going to be an amazing recruiter. They're going to be an amazing salesperson in order to be able to get like airlines and suppliers to come along with like a new company. Like basically you're going to be this minnow in a very large ocean who's got to get the sharks to like swim in formation. So like building communication and persuasion is going to be really important. And also you're going to need a dream team and you're going to need a lot of really great engineers. And the great engineers are going to want to work for somebody technical who understands the actual engineering. And so the leader in this thing has to understand the product.

58:40They can't just be a business person. So it was very clear from day zero, if I look in the mirror, I'm not the person who can do this. I need to become that person. I need to transform myself. And the first order of business was to learn the technical skills. So I took a deep breath. I'm like, okay, I have to actually understand this. So I went and did Khan Academy, like remedial calculus and physics, because I hadn't had any since high school. And I bought every textbook I could find from like college, you know, aerospace engineering courses. And I could read them and I would do the problem sets.

59:07And if I couldn't figure it out, I'd throw that book out and get a different book and try to get through the problem sets on that. I took an airplane design class and just started building a spreadsheet model of the airplane. And like, you know, I kept a Google doc as I was going. That was my, it was my confusion doc. Whenever I came across something that I could tell I didn't really understand, I would write it down. My idea was like every week I would take one thing off that list. And I eventually I had the very false idea that it would get to zero. It turns out it actually grows without bound.

59:37But the mental skill behind that is really important. I am confused all the time, or at least frequently. But I think I have, I'm tuned in and I know when I understand and when I don't understand. I know when I'm waving my hands and when I understand from first principles. And so getting to a real first principles understanding on the things that matter is really important. And I think people can do that. I remember somebody I talked to in the very early days, who kind of rolled their eyes. A year later, became one of our early employees. And he was like, wow, like a year ago, you were kind of like, didn't know what you're talking about.

1:00:09But now you sound like you've worked in the industry for 15 years. If you're passionate and driven, my experience has been that I can accrete the knowledge and skills that I need. And who did you call to like? So I remember going to LinkedIn. You know, so it turns out one of the key enabling technologies for Boom is LinkedIn. God, that's actually so sad. No, I think it's great. It's great because like, how could I have found the people for this? I'd like to think it's an engine or something, but yeah. Well, I mean, the engine matters too, but like it never would have started without LinkedIn because I don't know how I would have found the people.

1:00:46It'd been like far more difficult. And so I remember going to LinkedIn and you can like, connection equals first degree, industry equals aerospace, and it says no results. I don't know anybody in this industry. Not a soul. And I'm like, okay, second degree. And there was a guy who worked at SpaceX who was connected to one of my direct reports at Groupon. And I remember writing the email, like, hey, Brett, how well do you know Jamie? Do you know him well enough to introduce us? Because I've got an aerospace idea and I want to talk about it. And Brett's like, oh, yeah, we played hockey in college together.

1:01:21And so, okay, somebody who worked for me at Groupon had played college hockey with somebody who now worked at SpaceX. And so I got that intro and then I flew from Palo Alto to Hawthorne, which is where SpaceX headquarters is, on a little airplane I can fly myself, on a little rental single-engine airplane. And I showed up to the meeting and the only thing I had that was credibility was I showed up to the meeting in an airplane and flown to myself. Actually, that did add meaningful cred. For whatever reason, people respect that. Sure. I mean, it's also pretty gangster. It was fun. Yeah. It was fun.

1:01:53Yeah. So I ended up making a lot of laps from Palo Alto to LA to Hawthorne to the Mojave Desert just trying to meet people. And I would basically find the best person I could get a meeting with and I would say, if you could wave a magic wand and get anybody on the planet to come work with you on this, who would your top five people be? Don't worry about whether they want to do it. Don't worry about whether they're available or gainfully employed. All that matters is, are they the person that you want in the trenches doing this with you? Like that guy gave me five names. And then I met those people and I asked them the same questions.

1:02:29I was like recursively like searched my network. Pretty soon I was actually talking to some of the best people on the planet. And at this point, had you raised money? No, it was all like - Were you still using your fund fund? Yeah, I was using the fund fund. You know, I hired the first eight or 10 people out of the fund fund. and it was like, I'm playing chicken with my bank account. Like I got to stop doing this. I need to raise at some point. So you raised money from Y Combinator? No, it was before YC. We raised a seed round, which turned out to be almost exactly the same seed round size that my first company had raised.

1:03:02It was like 770K. And it was like incredibly difficult to raise that. I remember getting to closing day and thinking like, is anybody actually going to send their wire? But we had gotten a handful of people to do it. And I put in another 100K in that round. But one of the people in that round was Sam. Altman. He'd been doing looped while I was doing Pelago. And so I sort of knew of him that way because looped and Pelago, it was like the Kleiner bet and the Sequoia bet for the same idea-ish anyway. And so I knew of Sam that way and we had some mutuals. And so I got connected to Sam and Sam's a pilot and Sam loved this.

1:03:35And he's like, he's like, your seed run is overpriced. So I will write you only a small check, but he wrote us a check. And then he kept telling me to do YC and doing YC turned out to be a massive unlock. Like this company would not exist if it weren't for YC. Why? Multiple layers to it. Like the most superficial layer is that it was an important endorsement. Like the moment we decided we're doing YC, it got easier to raise more seed money. It's like every venture, every top venture firm just sprinkles a little magic dust of credibility, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. So that helped. The biggest thing that helped, I remember going through YC and like the first few weeks, I'm like, why am I here?

1:04:09You know, there were like three aerospace companies in that batch of like 110 companies. and we'd like sit in the corner and we're like, like everyone else is talking about like SEO. Like, why are we here? You know, what I realized relatively quickly is that most of the things that every startup was struggling with the same things we were, you know? And they said at one point, like, okay, demo day, you better show up with sales or your goose is cooked. And I'm like, wow, I've got eight weeks and I'd be lucky to sell an airplane in eight years. Demo day is when you get on stage to all the investors and show your product for five minutes.

1:04:39That's right, that's right. Yeah, it's like, what are we gonna show in eight weeks? We're definitely not going to have a flying supersonic jet in eight weeks. But we need technical proof and we need commercial proof. And YC really helped with that. There are a couple of different tracks on it. I realized pretty quickly, okay, on the commercial side, I'm not going to sell airplanes to United in eight weeks. Who's going to put a pre-order for a supersonic jet from a company in some guy's basement? Okay, it's either going to be a startup airline or maybe Virgin would do it. I focused on startup airlines and Virgin.

1:05:12So in the run-up to demo day, all we had was an LOI from a startup airline. By the way, that startup airline hadn't finished starting. It was very questionable whether this actually meant anything. But it was on paper a$3 billion LOI because the product costs$200 million, 15 airplanes gets you there. But it was pretty flimsy. I remember going to the practice demo day speech. And the other thing I love about YC is PG has built a culture of incredible directness. Like Michael Siebel said to me, Blake, do you have anything that's real? Because you sound like you're completely full of shit. And I'm like, ow, that hurt.

1:05:50But I think I kind of needed to hear it. So in parallel, I was working on Virgin. So the way the week of demo day was lined up is there was spread across two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. And by luck, we were on the second day, on Wednesday. So Monday, we take the company out of stealth mode. Ashley Vance, who had been Elon's first biographer, wrote the story. And in my head, this was going to be brilliant because it was going to be like, boom is the new SpaceX. What I didn't realize is just how darn early we really were and how to most of the world we would not look credible. And I let the Bloomberg team, this is not Ashley's fault, but I let the Bloomberg team take any photo they wanted.

1:06:26So they got this photo of me on an orange plastic chair climbing into a cardboard mock-up. It's a very awkward photo. Then the editor wrote the headline, which was something like, this Colorado company thinks it can build supersonic jets. And so that runs, and there's that picture. And then it's like, we're at the top of Hacker News, and it's just brutal. You know, what a stupid company. Don't they know that airplanes aren't made out of cardboard? And like, what idiot runs marketing? Why would you name a supersonic jet company after the sound of an explosion? And it was just like brutal. And that was Monday and Tuesday.

1:07:00Like I'm in an Airbnb, you know, on the peninsula trying to get ready for demo day. I know this is like, we are so screwed. Like we're going to pass his hand to us on demo day. Cause like, we've got this thing that nobody believes we can really build and like nobody wants it. And we've got like a picture of like test sections of the wing. And we've like, actually we brought an engine to demo day that turned out to be a good move. And we built a model of the airplane. Cause it was like, here's the aerodynamic invention. Here's a model of the airplane. and here you can see it. Yeah. And so that actually helped.

1:07:29But it felt like it was very non-delete. Flimsy. Yeah, flimsy. So on Tuesday, we got an email from Virgin that said, we're in for the first 10 airplanes. You can announce it tomorrow. And I fell off my chair practically. So I'm like, wait, did I read that email correctly? Because I think we just got saved. And I remember calling the press guys at YC, or gals actually, and I was like, I think I have something newsworthy and I don't know how to do an announcement. Like, would you help me do this? And so I stayed up until midnight night, the night before demo day, doing press pre-release. And we're like, okay, we're going to relaunch the company.

1:08:00And so we show up the next day with not 3 billion in LOIs, but 5, because now Virgin's in the list. And all of a sudden, that added credibility to the story. And that day, we're on top of Hacker News again. And the comments are like, Monday, colon, ha ha, what a stupid company. Wednesday, colon, oh shit. And then another one was like, man, this is how you launch a company. It's the one-two punch. And I'm sitting there like, wow, this almost didn't happen. Oh my goodness. Everyone thinks we planned it. And what happened was we just busted our asses. And there was in YC, I really want to give a lot of credit to YC here.

1:08:34Jared Friedman, who was one of the group partners then, I was working on this thing with Virgin. I'm like, I emailed Branson. He hasn't replied. What do I do? I don't want to be annoying. I remember Jared saying, unless you feel really annoying, you're not emailing enough. And so I'm like, okay, I'll pester him more. And it turned out that made the difference. Why? He responded? Yeah. Like it turned out persistence mattered. And so what happened? You emailed them more and then what? Then they said, okay. And did you ever end up meeting Branson? I did. I met him along the way, but I was like trying to turn what had been.

1:09:06So the way that happened was Mark Kelly, who's now Senator Mark Kelly, back then was sort of a, you know, semi-retired special commander, SV Angel, so like Ron's firm had like helped get him on our advisory board. And so Mark's kind of like helping out. I'm like, who knows Branson? Well, Mark knows Branson. And so if I wrote emails from Mark to Richard, Mark would send them. And so the email from Mark to Richard was basically like, hey, there are these boom guys. I know you wanted to do supersonic for a long time. You should meet them. You're going to be in the Mojave Desert rolling out your new spaceship in a few weeks.

1:09:39The boom guys are going to be there too. You should meet them. We tried to get invited to the spaceship to roll out, and we never really got invited. So I sort of talked my way into it. But we did get 15 minutes with Branson. And it was at his hotel room in Mojave for 15 minutes, basically over breakfast. And he's a very thoughtful, visionary guy. And I'm telling him what we're doing and why. We had a little wooden model of the airplane that we'd painted in virgin colors. And he's looking, he's like, man, I love this, but I don't know if I have it in me to do two of these things. I'm already doing Virgin Galactic.

1:10:13You want me to do Virgin Supersonic 2? And I said, Richard, we're not asking for your money. What we're asking is when this flies, would you like the first ones to have a Virgin logo on the tail? Do you want the airplane first? And if you say yes to that, then I'll go get the money somewhere else. So I don't need your money. I need your belief that you want this product to exist. And so ultimately he went for that. Wow. Can I ask you like when you went home after all of this and you're like, all right, we raised money at YC. Like, honey, guess what? Like I'm doing like a jet company. Yeah. What was the reaction?

1:10:48There was this sort of progressive, like, a little bit of like, whoa, I didn't expect that. There were some moments along the way that led to surprise, I guess. Before I hired anybody, I built an advisory board. And so I'm like, as I'm walking, I'm like, I have no cred, except that I know enough that at least I make sense mostly when I talk about it. Like, I needed to collect people for cred. And so I got in the former SAP of Lockheed Skunk Works to join the advisory board. I'd gotten some people who worked on supersonic flight at Gulfstream to join the advisory board. I collected a handful of advisors that added something to the company, and they were saying, actually, this makes sense.

1:11:29I remember that created an inflection point in belief for people. Not that it went all the way from zero to one, but it went from zero to 0.1. Is this the most important thing in your life? Right now, the most important things in my life are supersonic flight and being a good dad. Is this all you think about? No. Like I would love to do way more. What do you mean? So one of my reflections on Supersonic is no one was working on it, but it was very possible. I think there's a bystander effect of innovation. We tend to get told in the Valley that if our idea is any good, there are already going to be several decent teams working on it.

1:12:10And so if you're working on something that nobody's working on, heavily question the idea. It's probably no good. or there isn't a good answer to why now. And it's terrible advice. The result of that advice is that there is these like mass rushes of talent into a small number of ideas while other ideas get completely ignored. For supersonic flight, that was like supersonic flight would obviously be good. Nobody's doing it. It must be a bad idea. And so as a result, no one even looks. Why am I doing supersonic flight? I was the first like semi-decent entrepreneur to just look. I think a whole lot of people could have done this, but they just didn't look.

1:12:49People probably far more talented than I am could have done this, probably done it better than I'm doing it, but they didn't look. As time has gone by, I've come to believe that supertronic flight is not the only thing in that category. There are many things in that category that are gigantic businesses, gigantic problems in the world waiting to be solved, and nobody's doing it. Like I wish I could copy paste myself three or four ways and work on a bunch of these in parallel. Can you? Right now, I think it would be irresponsible. We're not far enough along yet and boom. Like Elon had to get the rocket into space, get it cooking before he could do some other thing.

1:13:26I mean, he managed to like save SpaceX and Tesla at the same time. Yeah. And like, holy Toledo, like mad respect for that. But I almost don't think it'd be fair to our investors to like divide myself prematurely. I think we've now gotten far enough along, I really hope this is true, that supersonic flight is actually inevitable. A month ago, I think it was not inevitable. And that if boom had failed, the world would have drawn the conclusion that a startup can't build a supersonic jet. Now we've proven that a startup team can. And I think it's inevitable that regulation will change and allow supersonic flight over land.

1:14:02I think those two things together mean that if we don't succeed, somebody else will. but nonetheless, I want it to be boom. And until that feels assured, I don't think it's responsible for me to go have another project. Yeah, I think that's totally fair. Do you think it's possible to be a good dad and be what you are as an entrepreneur? I mean, ask my kids. I'm definitely not the dad that spends the most time and I have four kids now. By the way, if this is too personal, don't - No, it's okay. This is life. and I do conversations like this because I want to be helpful to other entrepreneurs and I want more people to do more big things and I don't think I do a service by like sugarcoating things or keeping things off limits.

1:14:48Like it's been tough. Like the worst parts are where I feel like I really, really need to be in two places at the same time. Like I took one family vacation in two years, that hurt. But I try to be, when I'm with my kids, I try to be really present. I won't be the dad that spent the most hours but the hours I spend, I have the power to make them good hours. And I try to, the kids have the downside of a father, they're only with half the time to begin with, who is extremely busy. So at least let me give them the upside of that too. Let me give them a front row seat to something pretty interesting.

1:15:23So for example, my kids came to the first XB-1 flight. They came to the first supersonic flight and let them be inspired by that. And let me tell them the real stories of how it goes and what it takes to create something like this if they want to. I don't want to, like, you know, force them to be aerospace entrepreneurs. But I want them to learn from me what it means like to lock onto something they really care about and be motivated enough to work really hard. You break a bit of a mental model for me, which is that I've had 225 guests or so on this show, all of whom I consider quite high achieving.

1:15:56And there's only two patterns that I found. The first is one that you would be right in the bullseye of, which is grit. And the second is actually a strong partner at home. It's been a surprising pattern that I've found in the show. I always thought that the sacrifice of doing great things was actually your home life. And it's been the opposite. And I'm just thinking out loud with you right now. I haven't had Steve Jobs or Elon or Richard Branson or Bezos on the show before. I haven't had people that have maybe this audacious of a vision. I don't actually have a question, but I'm just thinking out loud.

1:16:33Is the audacity of the vision so big that, in fact, you can't have friends, be a good dad, be a good husband at home, and be a good CEO? Is that the tax of the audacity, I suppose? I'm really trying to reject that. One of my closest mentors, Jeff Holden, who basically hired me at Amazon 25 years ago and then hired me again at Pelago and then bought my company at Groupon. And now he's on my board and I'm on his board. I remember asking him once in Seattle when I was at Pelago about how he – because he was a dad and he had a startup. How do you think about doing all these things in life? He said something which is like, I've always found that when there was something I really cared about, I could always find a way to fit it in if it mattered enough to me.

1:17:17That stuck with me. And so I try to find a way to have it all fit. And like, do I wish I had a supportive partner at home? Like, of course. But like, I haven't managed to achieve that. And so, okay, here I am. I could be a victim where I could find the best solution I can. And, you know, hopefully in 30 years, my kids aren't all in therapy about it. Yeah. By the way, I think it's a total, if every parent says children are resilient, I think it's like the biggest lie parents tell themselves. That what? That your children are actually resilient? Every adult I know is in therapy dealing with their childhood issues.

1:17:51Right. Hang on a second. That doesn't sound like resilience. Right. I mean, you can survive it. But like as a father, I'm always saying to myself, like, what am I doing now that's going to put them in therapy later? And how do I not do that? Yeah. And you're saying in some ways, like you're building some character right now that maybe will prevent them from going to therapy later. Yeah. I mean, I know for sure I'm making plenty of mistakes, but I'm like really trying not to. How old are they? The oldest is 12. The youngest is three. Do they understand the magnitude of what you're trying to do?

1:18:21The older three do. The youngest one, you know, she got to see one XB-1 flight. I think she doesn't know the difference between an airplane and a rocket yet, really. Like, I took her to a museum where we have a mock-up of the airplane that's in a museum. And she's like, it's daddy's rocket. And it was adorable. And then for, like, we would watch, like, the SpaceX videos together. This is when she was, like, two. And she'd be like, daddy, red car video. And I'm like, red car video, red car video. Do you want to watch like a YouTube video of like a car race? Test flight space. Like, so I, well, we'll get there.

1:18:52But like, I pull up like, you know, some like Formula One thing. He's like, no, daddy, red car rocket. Red car rocket. Oh, she's locked onto the Falcon Heavy original test flight. And it was like her favorite thing for a while was to like watch Elon put his roadster hurled at Mars. So I don't know how much she understands or doesn't understand. But my oldest, when she turned 10, it was one of those sort of like darker moments. Boom, because I was, it was very not clear that we would succeed. I was very worried we'd run out of money without ever having flown anything. And that that would be bad in a zillion ways.

1:19:29And yet for her, like basically dad has been working on this her entire life that she can remember. Because I started when she was like a year old. I took her out to ice cream and we're like driving home and she's in the back of the car and I'm feeling very pensive. And I said, Ada, how would you feel if this thing I've been doing your entire life didn't work and it never flew? And she didn't miss a beat. And she said, dad, I'd be proud of you for trying. And that means a lot to me. Wow. And yet that's also kind of the thing I tell myself, like I still get afraid of failure, but again, it's my, it's my wish for every founder, do something that you'd be proud to fail at.

1:20:05When you feel this sense of inevitability, but also this deep fear of failure, how do you square those two things at once? Like you obviously have to project this incredible exuberance and confidence on the outside. Yet I still know that you feel this palpable feeling that things could all come crashing down. And isn't that kind of the like curse of an entrepreneur? Maybe, I don't know. I mean, maybe am I supposed to pretend it's not that way? Maybe if I did, it'd be way easier to raise money. But it's not in my character to be that way. I definitely believe it's possible. Yeah. My mental model for myself is, I don't know if you've ever seen this, like how it's made videos for pasta, where there's this machine that's got the pasta dough in this big metal container.

1:20:50And it's got like a little hole that's like noodle shaped. And there's like a big crank, like massively pushing this pasta dough through the extruded hole to create the noodle. it requires an enormous amount of force to like turn the mound of dough into like you know the right shape noodle and i sort of imagine myself as i'm that dough and i like have to come out the right shape to be the leader of this thing and like the worst like all the worst things are about like when i'm like questioning my own leadership and like am i doing this right am i screwing it up but i try to i've had i mean i had the fortune i've had some great executive coaches i think that's really important.

1:21:24And I try to have some personal development goals. What is the most important thing for me to upgrade in myself at any given moment and really work on that? Are you going to be on the first flight, the first commercial flight? Definitely. The question is whether I'm on the first test flight. It's not answered yet, but I would like the answer to be yes. What do you mean? Meaning when it's not a certified airplane and it's flying for the very first time, am I on the airplane? But you wouldn't have been the test pilot for the one that you just did in I don't know. By the way, when it's an airliner, there's room for more than just a test pilot.

1:21:56You would like to be? I would love to be. Can't you just say I'm going to be on it? It's a complicated question, right? Meaning there's some key man risks in your future? There is, but there's also one of my most important jobs is to build the right safety culture. And I don't build a good safety culture by pretending the rules don't apply to me. So for example, during all of its design development and build flight test phase, I never got an XB1. I never sat in the airplane. I didn't want to be the CEO that got in the airplane and broke something. Sat in it, even if it's like just still grounded?

1:22:29I never got in the cockpit. So after the 13th flight, which is the final flight, the stairs are there and I'm like, I'm going to go get in the airplane. And I got in the airplane. I was probably like the toddler at the museum, like flipping all the switches, you know? Because I'm like, okay, there's no safety criticality here anymore. but I didn't let myself do it until it would be appropriate for anybody in the team to be there just for the enjoyment of it. And we could talk a lot about safety culture and building that, but I think I need to lead by example. I shouldn't be on the airplane on a test flight unless I have a reason to be there.

1:23:04And because I want to, it's not a good enough reason. I was going to say, are you going to come up with a reason? Well, I like to invent a reason like I know enough to be a good flight test engineer, or I'm skilled enough as a pilot to be up in the front. If I can invent a good enough reason and it really passes muster, then I would love to do it. But it's like, that would be like the side hustle. If you have a Starlink on there, you 100 % need to go live from the test. That's a good enough reason. Well, somebody else could do that, but yes. No, it has to be you. Wait, you know, all right. You're justifying this.

1:23:33You have to. Can I be on the first commercial flight? Well, there are only 64 seats on it and a lot of people want to be in the first one. So it's going to be, that will really be up to the first airline. Those won't be our seats to allocate. Who do you think is going to do it? United? I mean, United was first to order. They certainly could be first to have a commercial flight. I have a feeling my 1K status isn't going to bump me up to the top 64. It'll be a pretty special flight. I think we'll be able to engineer it such that there are a number of first flights. Each overture flight on a new route will be a record-setting flight.

1:24:07So there actually will be a lot of opportunities to be on record-setting flights. That's awesome. I'd like to do one of them. You should absolutely do one of them. I'm in. I'm in. Thank you for doing this. Are you hiring? Yes, but slowly. There's a whole other story there. A thing I've come to believe is it's actually really easy to get ego invested in the wrong things, like how big is the team? And I've tried to become ego invested in how small is the team. And so we did XP1 with 50 people. What? Yeah. I think we can do our engine with maybe 25. And I don't know how small the production airplane team could be, but I think it could be pretty small.

1:24:41How big is the company right now? 135 or so. How much have you raised? 600. Wow. I know what we know now we could have done what we've done for probably 200, not 600. Like you have money sitting in the bank? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we also were like, we were like, we made a bunch of mistakes along the way that cost money. And one of them was letting the company get too big, bigger than it needed to be. And, you know, and so we just, we learned how to be efficient. Do you think you let the company get bigger than it needs to be because you had some ego around size of company? Well, a little bit. Like you wanted to say that you run a company that has hundreds of people?

1:25:14It wasn't quite that bad, but there was, we were fighting to have people believe in us. And in the aerospace industry, all the legacy players think you need astronomical teams. And if you go in and you say, well, I've got 50 people, they're like, oh, you can't do anything. It's bullshit. But like, that's the belief. And so we were trying to get to the point where we wanted to get suppliers on board, we wanted to get airlines on board, and it helped have a larger team. And I think that caused me to lose some discipline. So if I could go back, I would invert that, and I would proudly tell the story about small and mighty teams versus letting it get bigger.

1:25:50And then we almost SPAC'd, and so we built up a bunch of G &A to be a publicly traded company. And so glad that never happened. That would have been a massive mistake. Thank God. Yeah. But then we had a world-class accounting team, but like we don't need a world-class accounting team. Right. So what are you hiring for? Anybody who's extraordinary, we will hire. So we have a very high talent bar, but whether you're an engineer or like a product designer or like a really great marketer, almost any role in the company, we will hire you now. So long as you are truly extraordinary. As long as the marketer signs off on you going on the test flight with your phone, with your phone.

1:26:31And do you live here and the company's in Denver? No, no. The company's in Denver and I'm in Denver. Okay. So everybody's in Denver. The vast majority. Like during COVID, we created some remote. We're not really doing much remote anymore. And then we're building a factory in North Carolina. Some will be in person in North Carolina, but the core of the team's in Denver. When are you going to do the interior announcement? I don't know yet. I mean, we could do it tomorrow, but I don't think the, I think we're going to keep it in our back pocket a little bit longer. Let it cook. Can I come and do it with you?

1:27:03Like, can I go out there and talk about it with you? Sure. You know, but I don't know if it's like two years from now or two months from now. I don't care. Yeah, sure. Come out. Try it out. I don't care. Yeah. All right. We'll sit in the seats. We can sit in the seats. And record. That would be fun. That would be fun. When you hear the word grit, what do you think of? I think of the shrimp and grits I had for lunch yesterday. I don't know. I think of persistence. I think of not giving up. And I think of what enables that. and it's the strong belief in a mission that enables me to have grit. The hairs have been standing up on my arm for almost two hours and John Doerr has an expression around entrepreneurs and he described Bezos this way, which is he looks for the ones that have a convincing ability to bend the future towards their will.

1:27:52You have thoroughly convinced me that you are going to bend the future to your will and I appreciate, I just really appreciate you doing this and being so honest and going for it. Thank you. Yeah. It feels like the honor of a lifetime.

1:28:09That's it. Thanks for listening. If you liked the episode, please tell a friend and check back every Monday morning for a new guest or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production and was edited by Eric Johnson from Lightning Quad. Thank you.

1:28:29Thank you.